Level 1

Varieties (ignoring reinforcement learning)

Supervised: classification

Supervised: regression

Unsupervised: data

Unsupervised: example result

Level 1: summary

Machine learning comes in two varieties:

• supervised learning:
  • typically lots of data-label pairs
  • aim is to build a model data -> label
  • categorical labels: classification
  • numeric labels: regression
• unsupervised learning:
  • unlabelled data
  • goals are vaguer but generally aims to simplify data and uncover patterns

Level 2

How does a computer “see” a cat?

How many images are possible?

• for a 20 x 20 binary image -> \(X\) has dimensionality of 400
• \(2^{400}\approx 2 \times 10^{120}\) possible images
• a very small proportion of those correspond to real world type images
• a very small proportion of real world images correspond to cats
• idea: even if dimensionality is big, effective dimensionality much lower
  • ML aims to find these lower dimensional representations

Supervised learning

Supervised learning

Rule determination

• Want to learn a rule \(f: X \rightarrow y\)
• Rule is a mathematical function controlled by low-dimensional parameters: \(f=f(\theta)\)
• Have training data:

\[(X_1, y_1), (X_2, y_2), ..., (X_n, y_n)\]

Can we learn \(f\) by optimising \(\theta\) on training data?

Example rules

What is \(\; f\)?

• Linear combination of elements of \(X\) (linear regression)
• Linear combination of functions of elements of \(X\) (kernel regression)
• Regression trees (random forests, boosted regression)
• Non-linear combinations of elements, stacked into multiple layers (deep learning)

How to learn optimal parameters?

Unsupervised learning

Unsupervised learning

Unsupervised learning: what does \(Z\) capture?

Unsupervised learning: clustering

Level 2: summary

• ML algorithms take numeric objects (vectors / matrices / tensors) as input
• intrinsic dimensionality of most things \(<\) raw dimensions: world simpler
• supervised learning:
  • determines a mathematical function to predict outputs from inputs
  • function depends on parameters which must be learned using training / testing data
  • learning based on optimising cost function

Level 2: summary

• unsupervised learning:
  • attempts to find more parsimonious representation of data
  • low dimensional variables learned may be more interpretable
  • clustering is an example of unsupervised ML

Questions?

Example house price versus size data

Example model: house price and size

\[\begin{equation} H_i = a + b S_i + \epsilon_i \end{equation}\]

where \(H_i\) is the house price; \(S_i\) is the size in square feet; and \(\epsilon_i\) is an error term.

What does this model look like?

What are \(\epsilon_i\)?

Choice of loss function

Choose a model to minimise the sum of squared errors, that is:

\[\begin{equation} L = \frac{1}{K} \sum_{i=1}^{K} \epsilon_i^2 \end{equation}\]

which is the same as choosing values of \(a\) and \(b\) to minimise:

\[\begin{equation} L = \frac{1}{K} \sum_{i=1}^{K} (H_i - (a + b S_i))^2 \end{equation}\]

Least-squares regression line

What about other loss functions?

Least absolute deviation loss:

\[\begin{equation} L = \frac{1}{K} \sum_{i=1}^{K} |\epsilon_i| \end{equation}\]

Quartic power loss:

\[\begin{equation} L = \frac{1}{K} \sum_{i=1}^{K} \epsilon_i^4 \end{equation}\]

Other regression lines

How do we estimate parameters?

Suppose we want to minimise a least-squares loss function:

\[\begin{equation} L = \frac{1}{K} \sum_{i=1}^{K} (H_i - (a + b S_i))^2 \end{equation}\]

Choose \(a\) and \(b\) to minimise this loss \(\implies\) differentiate!

Learning parameters

determine \(\hat{a}\) and \(\hat{b}\) as those minimising \(L\):

\[\begin{align} \frac{\partial L}{\partial a} &= -\frac{2}{K}\sum_{i=1}^{K} (H_i - (a + b S_i)) = 0\\ \frac{\partial L}{\partial b} &= -\frac{2}{K}\sum_{i=1}^{K} S_i (H_i - (a + b S_i)) = 0 \end{align}\]

General solution of loss-minimisers

For general loss functions, no solution exists. That is, usually equations like:

\[\begin{align} -\frac{2}{K}\sum_{i=1}^{K} (H_i - (a + b S_i)) &= 0\\ -\frac{2}{K}\sum_{i=1}^{K} S_i (H_i - (a + b S_i)) &= 0 \end{align}\]

have no solution. (Here, they actually do.)

Gradient descent

Instead of solving equations directly, we use gradient descent optimisation

1. initialise parameters \(a=a_0\), \(b=b_0\)
2. in each epoch update parameters:

\[\begin{align} a &= a - \eta \frac{\partial L}{\partial a}\\ b &= b - \eta \frac{\partial L}{\partial b} \end{align}\]

until \(a\) and \(b\) no longer change. \(\eta\) is the learning rate

Gradient descent: initial point

Gradient descent: first step

Gradient descent: next step

Gradient descent: convergence

Gradient descent in 2D

Too high learning rate

Too low learning rate

Making the model more complex

\[\begin{equation} H_i = a + b S_i + c S_i^2 + \epsilon_i \end{equation}\]

What does this model look like?

Quadratic regression line

How to estimate model parameters?

Least-squares loss function:

\[\begin{equation} L = \frac{1}{K} \sum_{i=1}^{K} (H_i - (a + b S_i + c S_i^2))^2 \end{equation}\]

Then use gradient descent

\[\begin{align} a &= a - \eta \frac{\partial L}{\partial a}\\ b &= b - \eta \frac{\partial L}{\partial b}\\ c &= c - \eta \frac{\partial L}{\partial c} \end{align}\]

What about more complex models?

\[\begin{equation} H_i = a + b S_i + c S_i^2 + d S_i^3 + ... \epsilon_i \end{equation}\]

More complex model

Which model is best?

Original data

New data

What went wrong?

• adding more parameters always reduces error on training set
• but results in a model that generalises poorly
• all else being equal simple models are better

What is a good fitting model?

How to get to a “fit” model?

Hold out a separate validation set to test model predictions on

Using validation set to determine optimal model complexity

Will a trained model perform as well in real life?

No:

• use of validation set means that we effectively overfit to it
• thus create a separate testing set that is used only once to gauge performance

Create test set

Linear regression summary

• linear regression defines a loss function (typically mean squared error) between actual and predicted observations
• training can be done via gradient descent: each epoch corresponds to a single parameter update
• (gradient descent also used to train many other methods, like neural nets)
• fitting regression with more complex functional forms can fit more complex data
• but risks poor generalisation

Questions?

How to learn more?

All available on SOLO:

• “The hundred-page machine learning book”, Burkov
• “Hands-On machine learning with Scikit-Learn & Tensorflow”, Geron

Coursera:

• Data Science: Statistics and Machine Learning Specialization, Johns Hopkins